5 Minutes at a Time

It's Monday. I got through the weekend without doing any editing and it made me really want to edit today. So that's when I realized I have about 4 hours every night after work when I can edit, so I think I'll start doing more of that. Then I won't feel as pressured to fit it into my weekend.

But yeah, I just cut another 5 minutes of the movie. I'm going in a completely arbitrary order. I started with the beginning, then went straight to the end, then to about 2/3 of the way through the movie. And today a random scene about 1/3 of the way through the movie. Altogether I've probably got a rough cut of 45 minutes of the movie or so, but all spread out...which sounds like it's close to half, but I don't think it is. This movie might be longer than I though...or maybe I just can't gauge how much is left.

But I guess if I am halfway, that's reason for celebrating a little bit....of course it's halfway through a rough assembly of the footage. There's no color correction or sound effects or music or anything. So each of those are basically another pass through of the whole thing. So there are lots of halfway points to go through.

This is going to be an odd little film. It keeps surprising me. Looking at the footage with sort of a cleaner perspective now, I think I need to trust my gut more on set. Because the things I didn't put much thought into all seem to look really good and the things I possibly over-thought aren't as strong as they could be. I need to trust myself and not worry so much that I haven't thought of everything or don't know what I'm doing...because I think I actually do.

I'm really eager to see what the overall effect of this film is. The sequence I cut today is a series
scenes when the two main characters start doing research and tests for building the rocket. The flow is really interesting. Because I use a lot of long shots and wide shots, it's like each scene is a little painting that something happens in. And it just goes from painting to painting. I don't mean that in the sense that every shot is just really beautiful or anything. But I guess it's that you're more aware with my compositions that you're looking at these little windows with things going on in them. Usually these kinds of shots are for epic things, but it's kind of fun to have them for fairly insignificant and mundane things. And I'm really interested to see how in the end the story works being told this way. Not that everything is a wide shot...it's just there are a lot of them. And few close-ups in general. It's very non-traditional. I sometimes wonder if that was a mistake....

...because I've never just made a normal movie. In the sense that people have certain expectations for movies and I've never proven myself by delivering those expectations because I guess I feel to a degree that since I'm aware of those expectations and am tired of them I have the freedom and desire to go beyond them...which sounds good and fun, except it means I'm always experimenting, which in turn means I risk making something digestible to normal audiences by messing with the rules they know. My hope is that at least with this project that the language will still be familiar enough for people to follow it.

My biggest fear is that people will find it boring. We'll see.